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Taking a Gamble

The sports betting rooms in the Mandalay Bay Casino Hotel, Las Vegas, 2006.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Six 40-inch televisions, each showing a different sport; a banquet table cluttered with hockey digests and Yoo-Hoo; the boss sausaged into tube socks and armed with a copy of “Hide Your A$$et$ and Disappear”: no, this is not your typical workplace. But then, professional sports betting — a sordid, florid microworld lurching along the edge of society, not to mention legality — is not your typical job. And Beth Raymer’s account of her years in the peripatetic employ of high-stakes sports bettors is not your typical gambling memoir or, really, your typical memoir at all.

Generally, gambling memoirists — Martha Frankel (“Hats and Eyeglasses”), Bill Lee (“Born to Lose”), to name two examples in this mini-genre — concentrate on their own addiction. But Raymer does not really have a betting problem: just a taste for thrills, a craving for a surrogate family and a high tolerance for lowlifes. Within the first several pages of “Lay the Favorite,” she gets fired from a group home for letting three troubled girls run away, moves to Las Vegas because of a boyfriend, breaks up with him and lies her way into a job placing customers’ bets for one Dink Heimowitz — he of the tube socks — at Dink Inc.

What Raymer initially lacks in applicable skills she makes up for with her performance on the job, and with a sheer fondness for gambling inherited from her adoptive father (who did have a problem). “As long as I sat next to my dad, the dealers let me play,” she writes of her first of many childhood casino trips. “When I was dealt blackjack, Dad would yell ‘Beth-annana! Big-banana!’ and give me a high-five. I’d take a sip of his beer and wiggle my toes inside my pink glitter jellies in excitement.” Raymer finds herself both hooked on the job’s adrenaline rush and sweetly at home with her motley new crew; eventually, she’s accepted into the larger brotherhood of gamblers who gather beneath outdoor chandeliers and have names like Lobster, as well as very angry wives. (“They like you,” Dink assures her about his friends. “But they barely tolerate women.”)

Technically, “Lay the Favorite” is not 100 percent memoir. It’s also a tragicomic biography of Raymer’s misfit-math-whiz boss-slash-father figures: first Dink, and then — after an incomplete attempt to leave gambling for, well, boxing — Bernard Rose of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., a manic rac­onteur with a Rabelaisian appetite for garlic knots and pedicures. Raymer is an ace at description: from American neo-gothic detail (her sister lived with “an abusive drug addict who had a Lee Press-On Nail for a front tooth”) to gambling patois (“Gimme the Bulls first half, over oh one minus the oh nine for two dimes”). The generous emphasis on her mentors underscores her even greater strength: compassion. She never condescends or indulges in ­reality-show caricature; she finds charm in the charmless, a point of light in the most lost of souls. (Sometimes to a fault: said souls include a violent, amoral co-worker who brags about his sexual exploits and searches the Web for penicillin to administer to his thieving, penicillin-allergic dad.)

It’s this solicitude that makes all the more puzzling — and sour — Raymer’s shabby treatment of a sad-sack addict who owes her money. If this story is accurate, deeper self-reflection is wanting. And Raymer’s discussion of her stint as an amateur boxer never quite meshes with the rest.

But tidiness and lack of ambiguity are probably not what we want from a memoir and — as we’ve learned — not what Raymer wants from life. By book’s end, she’s engaged, and not to a gambler. Still, though her publisher’s bio hints of august achievements to come (she has an M.F.A. from Columbia and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2007), it’s clear she’s not about to settle down. Will she ever really abandon her search for the next thrill? I wouldn’t bet on it. h

LAY THE FAVORITE

A Memoir of Gambling

By Beth Raymer

228 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $25

Lynn Harris, a journalist, is the author of the novel “Death by Chick Lit” and other books.

A version of this review appears in print on July 11, 2010, on page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Taking a Gamble. Today's Paper|Subscribe